200 Years Ago, Erie Canal Got Its Start as Just a ‘Ditch’

On July 4, 1817, Judge John Richardson, who was also a local contractor, officially broke ground with a ceremonial spade, then unleashed the team of oxen he had hitched to his plow in a nondescript field in upstate Rome, N.Y., to begin construction of what eight years later would become the Erie Canal.

While only four feet deep, the 363-mile-long, 40-foot-wide ribbon of water linking the Hudson River with Lake Erie was more than just a civil engineering marvel. The canal affirmed New York’s political ascendancy over Virginia and the rest of the South (four of the first five presidents were Virginians) and its commercial dominance over competing ports not just on the Eastern Seaboard, but all the way to New Orleans.

No wonder that in his “Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation” (2005), Peter L. Bernstein wrote: “A town with an imperial name was about to witness the birth of a project that would turn New York into an imperial state.”

A waterborne passage across the state had been envisioned at least since the 18th century, most vigorously by Cadwallader Colden, a scientist and politician, beginning in 1724. But the eventual route that roughly followed the Mohawk River west to Lake Erie was largely credited to an anonymous essayist who called himself Hercules.

Image

Large fermentation tanks belonging to the Genesee Brewing Company on a barge on the Erie Canal last month in Waterford, N.Y.CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

His published entreaties caught the eye of DeWitt Clinton, the civic-minded legislator and mayor of New York City, who committed himself to the project. Clinton was inaugurated as governor on July 1, 1817, three days before the groundbreaking, after having been elected largely on the strength of his commitment to the canal.

The state pursued the $7 million shallow channel, originally derided as “Clinton’s Ditch,” on its own after President Thomas Jefferson said a federal subsidy for a New York State project would be “little short of madness.”

Clinton’s political enemies in New York agreed. So did skeptics who cautioned that the project, more than twice as long as any other canal on the globe. (The Languedoc — now known as the Canal du Midi — was then the longest; at about 140 miles, it linked the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay in southern France.) Moreover, it was being entrusted to amateurs from a young nation, which didn’t even have an accredited engineering school yet.

But when Clinton celebrated the opening on Nov. 4, 1825, emptying a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic in New York Harbor in a symbolic “wedding of the waters,” thousands of immigrant laborers and not a few slaves had completed a canal that reduced travel time across the state to six days from six weeks and the cost of shipping a ton of wheat from Ohio to New York City to less than $10 from $100.

Image

DeWitt Clinton, who was elected mayor of New York City in 1803, promoted the construction of Erie Canal. He took office as governor three days before the groundbreaking.CreditAssociated Press

Only a few months before, Hercules had revealed himself as Jesse Hawley, a Connecticut Yankee transplanted to Upstate, where, as a failed flour merchant, he wound up in debtor’s prison and drafted his essays.

“The first hint on this subject which I have seen in print was suggested by Jesse Hawley,” Clinton later wrote.

In 1825, Clinton also helped break ground for the Ohio & Erie Canal, which was viewed as an extension of the Erie Canal and joined the Hudson with the Mississippi and New York City with New Orleans.

By then, other Eastern Seaboard cities had great harbors, but none had a comparable water tributary to the expanding interior of the United States.

Image

The town of Lockport on the Erie Canal.CreditHulton Archive, via Getty Images

Within eight years, tolls had paid off the Erie Canal’s cost. Only 11 years after it opened, the canal was widened. A new barge canal was built in the early 20th century that incorporated portions of the original route.

In 50 years, New York City had grown from 120,000 people to more than a million in 1870. What historians called “a river of gold” flowing into the city’s lap had also proved to be a triumph of a fledgling democracy and capitalism, said James S. Kaplan, president of the Lower Manhattan Historical Association.

What was known as the Great Western Canal exported New York’s politics and principles to the rest of the nation. It was celebrated in story and song (that old mule Sal, who hauled barges between the low bridges until animal power was replaced by engines in the 20th century).

And even today, after railroads and later highways offered cheaper alternatives (freight tonnage peaked in 1872), the canal corridor has become a recreational mecca.

In a nation that was barely a quarter-century old and had just emerged from a destructive war, Clinton sold New Yorkers on a bold engineering project that captured the public imagination.

“The building of the Erie Canal,” George Rogers Taylor, an economic historian, wrote, “was an act of faith, the demonstration of a spirit of enterprise by an organized government that has few parallels in world history.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: 200 Years Ago, Erie Canal Got Its Start as Just a ‘Ditch’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe